Maintaining compliance with regulations such as GDPR, SOX, ISO9001, and internal controls is crucial for organisations. Employees involved in the compliance process need to embed the following:
Consistency
Control
Transparency
By clearly defining roles and responsibilities and ensuring the prompt execution of compliance tasks, organisations can achieve greater transparency and confidently meet their chosen standards.
What are the steps to ensure consistent compliance?
What are the main challenges of being compliant in Record to Report?
Access control
IT security
Data backup
Change management
Restricts access to sensitive financial information
Safeguards data against cyber threats
Implements reliable data backup practices
Effectively manages changes in the IT environment
Overcoming these challenges is vital to adhering to compliance, ensuring data security, and protecting financial information.
In financial compliance, the Record to Report (R2R) process is vital in ensuring accuracy and transparency in an organisation’s financial reporting. As part of this process, conducting thorough compliance testing becomes paramount.
Organisations can effectively assess and evaluate their finance department’s processes and controls by creating a series of well-defined tasks.
Reviewing journal entries
Reconciling accounts
Verifying financial statements
Ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements
Identify gaps or deficiencies in their financial processes
Mitigate risks
Strengthen overall compliance
With each task meticulously designed, organisations can instil confidence in their financial reporting and uphold the highest standards of integrity and accountability.
Efficiently managing compliance tasks requires a structured approach. Building unique task templates is the key to streamlining and standardising the compliance process.
Within Aico, each task is linked to a task template. These are endlessly configurable and can be set up to dictate:
How to conduct specific compliance tests
The attachment of the required documentation
The expected number of tests
Furthermore, the template’s header section offers valuable space to provide additional information, such as task descriptions or instructions.
When Aico executes compliance tests, the results are recorded in rows, enabling you to document test outcomes, add comments and attach supporting documentation. Categorising these results allows you to generate a compliance quality score, providing a comprehensive overview of the organisation’s adherence to regulatory standards.
When defining compliance task master data, organisations have various scenarios to consider.
Firstly, they can specify the frequency tasks should be performed, whether on a monthly, quarterly, yearly, or custom schedule.
Secondly, if the original task has already been carried out, this may include manual journals, payments, or account reconciliations and benchmarking the data to pre-defined criteria. Here, a compliance test might involve reviewing 20 manual journals exceeding EUR 50,000, ensuring proper supporting evidence and approval.
Compliance task templates are crucial in achieving compliance by providing a structured and systematic approach to meet regulatory requirements. They serve as actionable steps to ensure necessary processes, checks and controls are in place.
Defining and assigning tasks
Delineating responsibilities
Addressing each compliance requirement
Compliance automation – a key feature to monitor compliance at scale
Compliance task automation is a powerful feature offered by intelligent financial systems like Aico. With automation rules, organisations can streamline the creation of compliance tasks, saving time and effort.
For instance, Aico allows for the automatic attachment of ERP reports and includes sample data when tasks are performed within the system. This automation extends to bringing forward results from prior period tasks, enabling comparisons and trend analysis to identify improvements or deterioration in compliance performance.
Furthermore, Aico goes beyond providing comprehensive reporting and offers a detailed audit trail, documenting every user action with timestamps. This includes tracking comments and note attachments and providing a transparent record of compliance activities. Through automation, Aico empowers organisations to enhance efficiency, accuracy and accountability in the compliance processes.
For organisations seeking a powerful solution to streamline and enhance their compliance monitoring at scale, Aico Compliance Manager stands as a powerful choice.
Task automation
Attachment of ERP reports
Trend analysis
Detailed audit trails
Aico offers a robust platform for managing and tracking compliance activities. By implementing Aico Compliance Manager, organisations can achieve greater efficiency, transparency, and control over their compliance processes, ensuring adherence to regulatory standards and mitigating risks effectively.